Thanks for your support, @Luna5 (and also @MrsNuBooty, @T1m0, @nico186, @Will, @ramaruro1 - and those who have shared support and questions with me directly), as well as the clarifying question.
By saying I see the proposed role “enhancing our external and internal communications”, I’m referring almost entirely to alignment regarding marketing resources from Keep, NuCypher, the Threshold Marketing Guild (TMG) and outside support. And the alignment that touches on product and strategy is mainly so that I can ensure TMG is focused on the right things and not chasing every suggestion dropped in Discord or idea that comes up - but rather we’re supporting the aligned business and product strategies of the DAO and contributor teams.
So not only do I see my proposed role as not overlapping yours, I would have the time to meet with you one on one, to periodically attend key meetings from other guilds to better hear their activities and challenges first hand, and more. Not to mention that adding hours beyond what I’ve been able to commit previously will yield more and better focused Marketing Guild activity and results for your role to communicate and facilitate across the DAO.
As for interacting with any future roles the DAO or guilds/teams invest in, the more roles we have (including contributors of all types), the greater our need will be to work to keep them on the same page. And I do think it will be smart to invest more resources in growing and strengthening our wonderful community, which is why the Marketing Guild has an OKR for “Amplify Threshold community growth”.
That said, based on my experience in many different types of organizations (including 5 years of involvement with decentralized decision making and self-organized activity at ConsenSys), the way we currently approach requests for new resources (including roles) needs to evolve. Several things have become clear to me in the last week:
1. Threshold DAO is not only not set up for hiring people, we have no resource strategy articulated or broad discussion beyond specific proposals
2. While it’s healthy to have a range of views on what areas we should invest in and how much, we’re not having the meta discussion required to move toward a resource allocation strategy
3. If the longest standing and most successful DAOs are having operational challenges, our status quo will become a major impediment
4. Some contributors and potential contributors are holding back out of concern over our lack of legal entity and the Ooki DAO suit
Assuming there is broad agreement on these 4 points (or we work to create it), part of my time could go to helping forge a resource allocation strategy (e.g., Do we wait till we have significant product revenue and/or increased/diversified treasury to invest more than we currently are, or will allocating more now to certain areas get us to revenue faster? Which areas and how much? Do we make small test experiments and build on the results, or do we have the collective expertise to make sound judgments on how to go bigger sooner? We created the guild system in part to “delegat[e] more granular working group decision making and capital deployment to committee members, allowing the Threshold DAO to operate more effectively in a way that ultimately adds more value to the network”, but have we found the correct balance - and if so how can we articulate it for all to see and follow?).
Also a note on why I proposed the role as “Communications” when the activities are marketing: given the recent US lawsuit the Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed against Ooki DAO, I share the concern others have expressed regarding Threshold DAO having no legal entity (yet), so were I to have a full-time role - even the temporary one proposed - it’s probably helpful to emphasize publicly that our goal is to communicate the benefits of threshold cryptography generally and Threshold’s products specifically, not to market a token (even a work token, as T is).
Finally, I was already planning to share an update today based on all the feedback and questions I’ve received in Threshold meetings and privately, so let me do that here:
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As with the comments above, all I’ve communicated with have said they are glad I raised the issue in the proposal and offered to address it
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However, a number of people have reservations about one or more things:
a) a perceived increase in DAO liability if we add a full-time role, especially in the US
b) the total cost of the proposed 50-hour work week
c) whether the current Marketing Guild structure could be improved (thus potentially reducing the additional hours needed)
All are totally valid questions/concerns, and informed people can come to different conclusions on each (thus the benefit of discussing and continuing to articulate DAO principles and strategies, so we have a framework for approaching key resource decisions).
It seems that a good next step toward a decision (in addition to more community members hopefully reading this page and commenting!) is for me to revise the proposal to address these concerns, including by reducing the number of hours per week.
Before devoting more time to that (thus fewer to marketing), I’d ask that community members please share their thoughts - or at least like this comment, so I can get an indication of interest.
Thanks for reading, Threshodlers!
ps: thanks to @Nous for pointing out that the additional cost of the role would be less the 8 hours committee members (except those from the Keep and NuCypher teams) are paid for; unlike my first 6 months on the TMG Committee, for which I declined compensation, this term I am accepting the DAO-wide committee compensation.